This episode of PDACast is brought to you by adolescent medicine and educational services at Nationwide Children's Hospital.

Music Hello, everyone, and welcome once again to Piedacast.

It is a pediatric podcast for moms and dads.

This is Dr. Mike, coming to you from the campus of Nationwide Children's Hospital.

We're in Columbus, Ohio.

It's episode 570.

We're calling this one Substance Use Disorder and Fentanyl

overdose in teens. I want to welcome all of you to the program. So we have another important

topic for you this week as we consider substance use disorder and fentanyl overdoses.

And it's really important because it impacts way too many teenagers and families,

and all of these overdose deaths in teenagers, especially from fentanyl, is preventable.

Now, in the first year of the pandemic, fentanyl-related deaths and teenagers skyrocketed,

increasing by 177%.

Now, thankfully, this increase slowed to 2% between 2022 and 2023, which is more in line with the increases that we were seeing pre-pandemic.

However, we are still seeing a trend upward to the point where overdose deaths in teenagers

is one of the leading causes of deaths in this age group.

And as it turns out, still today, about 22 high school age teenagers die each week in

the United States from fentanyl overdoses. So again, way too many kids.

As I learned during the course of this interview, it's really about a classroom of high school

students every week in the United States who dies from a fentanyl overdose. And again,

these are preventable. Every single one of these deaths is a tragedy. So we're

going to dive into substance use disorder and fentanyl overdose in teens. We're going to look at the

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